He deliberately complicates a theme to make it harder to reach the meaning. Mir’s poetry has more emotional affect Ghalib’s has wit of a cerebral kind. Both were masters of verbal affinities within a sher, delicate thought (nazuk khayaali) and layered meanings. The temperament of his imagination differed from Mir’s, so did his favourite themes. Ghalib devised a literary language suited to his abstract thought. Yet their language of poetry is different. In a thought-provoking essay, which is, in a way, the prelude to his authoritative work on Mir Taqi Mir, Father assesses the poetic qualities inherent in Mir and Ghalib - not exactly peers, but not that far apart, either. He glowed with pride when I dared to disagree with him.
He encouraged me, showered appreciation and helped whenever I got stumped. My work on Ghalib brought me closer to Father. I hadn’t anticipated opening a Pandora’s box of unanswered questions. I was unaware this mustarad corpus was more substantial than Ghalib’s mutadavil ! Gyan Chand Jain’s invaluable Tafseer-i-Ghalib is the only complete exegesis of the ‘rejected’ verses, but he is terse, dispassionate and almost never appreciative of even the most extraordinary verses. Ghalib’s so-called ‘rejected’ verses are laden with heavy, far-fetched metaphors and unfamiliar vocabulary.
Then I found myself toying with the idea of commenting on the mustarad kalam.
I’d never thought of writing a tafheem of Ghalib. Father said a weakness in the early commentators’ approach was that they shied from consulting dictionaries his tafheem showed the way - not only for reading Ghalib, but for the classical ghazal as a whole. Sometimes commentators declared a verse muhmal because they misunderstood certain unusual words and usages of Ghalib. Father replied that he had selected well-known verses whose nuance previous commentators had missed. Once, in ignorance, I asked Father how his tafheem differed. There are maybe close to a hundred or more such commentaries. In the 1880s, Hilm Dihlavi published a book of detailed commentaries on 54 verses from the Urdu Divan. In 1989, at a request from the Ghalib Institute, Father’s exegesis of 138 verses was published as a 375-page book.įor a hundred years, Ghalib’s poetry had stimulated multiple interpretations of abstruse individual verses. In April 1968, Father initiated the monthly feature, ‘Tafheem-i-Ghalib’, for his journal Shabkhoon, and wrote it for 20 years. Ke khamoshi ko hai pairaya-i-bayan tujh se Gadaa-i-taaqat-i-taqreer hai zaban tujh se As a child, I relished poetry without understanding any of it, feeling important as I smoothly glided over the Persian-peppered verses of Ghalib’s mustarad ghazal: I enjoyed the rhythms of poetry, taking pride in my natural ability to read Urdu poems metrically. I liked this bit of extra information and never forgot what mustarad meant.
Correcting me as I read them aloud, he asked me to memorise them, casually adding that the ghazal was from Ghalib’s mustarad kalam. Father presented me some verses that I noted in my squiggly handwriting. I was maybe nine when introduced to Ghalib.